How To Combine SEO and UX to Improve Your Website
Remember the good old days when all you needed to do to be ranked as number one in search engines is to stuff your page with keywords? Now those search engines consider hundreds of factors when deciding which pages will have the highest rank. This is where UX, user experience, comes into play.
So many things play a major role in how high will your website be ranked. Here are a few of the top one:
- How easy your website is to navigate
- The quality of your content
- Whether your site is safe, fast and adaptable for different devices
Simply put, the expectations of online customers have changed quite a lot. And search engines are adapting and making changes based on the modification of user intent.
If you own an online business, you need to constantly adapt in order to maximize performance and maintain a competitive advantage. And you need to combine your SEO strategies with UX.
Let’s look at the ways how you can combine SEO and UX to improve your website:
The Common Goals of SEO and UX
Well, it is not even necessary to say that making money is the primary goal of every business. We all need to build trust and provide services or products that people need. In order to drive traffic to your website and increase conversations, you must maximize the visibility on search engines by optimizing your website.
When people have specific problems, they usually turn to Google or any other search engine they are using. They are there to seek answers. And once they find the website that will give them those answers, they expect nothing less than a great experience.
This is why SEO and UX need to work together toward a common goal and the end result is profit.
SEO’s main focus is the architecture of a website. Its goal is to drive more traffic to your website.
UX’s focus is keeping those new visitors and making them come back over and over again. It does this by making a web design that will minimize distractions and maximize conversations. If you can not make such a design yourself, you can always find a reliable website design company that will make you a custom website with a stunning and effective web design.
How User Experience & SEO Affect Each Other
Nowadays, online interactions between brand and customers are as diverse as never before and online customers are being more informed with quite a few choices for their problems.
In order to create that great and personalized experience for your customers, SEO and UX need to join forces. UX will work on website framework and content optimization that SEO needs in order to make crucial decisions to ensure high rankings in SERPs and with such teamwork, you will get an optimized experience for your users.
As I said, the goal of every business is to make money and you can not do that with only focusing on SEO or UX, they need to be in harmony!
How SEO Affects User Experience
Google, as well as other search engines, use algorithms in order to identify patterns of how and what are people searching online and keywords play a major role here. The basic principle of SEO is identifying, publishing, and optimizing content that will drive more visitors to your website.
When it comes to keywords, it is what people are looking for and this data is crucial for UX designers since it serves them as a sample of the total potential audience and that’s why they are integrating SEO data to influence their development route.
When you are sure what your customers’ needs are and what are they searching for, it is easier to make the correct adjustments to your website to enhance the user experience and SEO can work together with UX to make sure what web pages should be optimized for increased conversation and what should not.
Why UX Is crucial to the Future of SEO
Any online business wants users to engage with their website and make them come back as often as possible. The key to that happening is a smooth, optimized and well-designed user experience.
UX plays a major role in influencing how will a person perceive a website as well as having a positive impact on how search engines rank it. The best ways that UX can impact SEO elements are by website navigation.
In other words, users need to be able to quickly and easily find any information they are searching for on your website. And this is especially important for the mobile users who nowadays make up the majority of traffic. Engaging content and site speed are also some of the examples how UX impacts SEO.
Using SEO and UX as Tools to Improve Your Business
Once you’ve learned all you need to know regarding how SEO and UX affect and enhance each other performance, it’s time to improve your website and your business. Technology is advancing every day and with it so are search engines and customer’s needs.
Your business needs to keep up with trends in order to stand out in today’s very competitive market. You need to be aware of how your customers behave and how they engage with your content. And you should make any necessary adjustments as soon as is feasible. By combining SEO and UX into one strategy that will benefit your current and future customers, your business will blossom for sure.
Conclusion: SEO and UX go hand in hand
Google and other search engines are becoming more and more human. They are trying to mimic human behavior and following basic human principles for searching something online. With that in mind, you can see all the places where SEO and UX overlap. Clearly, the optimization you perform has a very positive effect on your website’s SEO. Of course, the impact of that effect can differ depending on your optimization. But SEO and UX are without a doubt a great match. When done properly, this can have a tremendous influence on your online business.
Your Turn
Do you have any other tips you’d like to add to the above? Please share these or your other thoughts with your fellow readers.
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Neil White
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